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I think Microsoft will eventually move to the volume license model. This will enable them to cut list price by 40 to 50% and still make the same money. They will have an on premises model and a cloud model.
We will then make our money strictly from services.
This is the route the hardware manufacurers took when they got tired of competing with Dell.
When I started in business the hardware margins were 30 to 40%.

Microsoft just published their quarterly results. If you look at the detail, the Dynamics area was flat for the year with a 4% growth in the last quarter. All the non-Office products in the Business products division make up 10% of that division's revenue - which puts all of Dynamics, including CRM, well under $1B. Microsoft's original target with Project Green, was to turn ERP into a $10B market. Instead it has become Project Red (as in red ink). So the solution is sell or split Dynamics, or mass market it.
If the current partner revamp project does not work - and it probably won't, because it does not address the real problems - then the mass market approach may well be next.

There was a plan in 2004 for volume licensing and for partners to earn revenue from licenses alone. However how do you keep the current partners whilst at the same time reducing the revenue they make? Additionally the cost of pre-sales and building a partner with the necessary skills and experience is simply very expensive. There are many large businesses out there that are dipping toes in the AX market, but at the same time leaving - if your focus is not Dynamics it is difficult to nod generally in the direction with the staff and skills needed - invest for little immediate return or stay where you are - and many are currently dipping toes. Some are purely selling and using other partners as the service partners - and these are big players - adding to the brand.

I am not saying Microsoft will not do this - they never removed it from the table to my knowledge, however there are many reasons why they have yet to go this way.

Also this will exacerbate the current issue - Your partner makes nothing from license sales, just revenue, therefore the costs of startup and continuation must be less, and therefore employing cheap resource is the simplest and most cost effective solution.

In my opinion Microsoft are still learning about the business ERP market, until they understand what they actually bought into in 2002/3 then they will not make the decision on volume licensing, because the outcome would potentially decimate the revenue stream for them, a revenue stream that is growing year on year. This was the overriding reason why Project Green was shelved, even though from a consumer perspective it made complete sense.

From the earnings statements, it appears Dynamics revenues have flat-lined the last couple of years.
We can blame the great recession, but Office has started growing again.
I think Microsoft will try something to kick start sales - maybe buy more companies. When that does not work, they will go the volume license approach and make the development tools available to everybody in MSDN and a more limited version in the VS Express.
I hope I am wrong, but at some point Microsoft has to start making money on its various losing ventures or drop them.

I can see a clear shift in MS strategy in moving from horizental partners to Vertical partners. Partners are expected to demonsterate skill level of not only MS products but of particular industry segments. They beleive this will play a pivotal role in winning big accounts.
Moreover they are now trying to reduce the number of partners. I beleive this will be good in the long run......
Last few years becoming a Dynamics Partners was damm easy....When I started my company I was the lone member with virtually no infrastructure other than my laptop and test server. That may not be relevant especially looking at the success story of MS itself but having this as a corporate policy to promote more partners gives me a headache. The attitude is to do more sales and forget about the successful implementation and as few have pointed correctly that MS is still a product company and not a service company. Quality service doesn't even figure in their scheme of things. One more problem that I see is the preference given to big partners. Smaller partners are bullied, deprived of benefits.... and so on. It looks that they are not interested to retain them. Evaluating the performance (Customer Satisfaction) is no criteria. Though smaller partners will prevail but I can see lot of takeovers of small companies in future.

I'm not complaining. I just say that I understand what David is talking about and that I detect it as a problem as well. Maybe there is no way to get out of it. But we should at least discuss it.


@Miklos: Interesting view to the business.
This will never happen unless there's a significant change in business. Even if your vision of add-ons would become reality then these add-ons are build up on the standard. Thus there has to be someone who is able to implement and support the standard. Maybe the rate of standard consultants to add-on consultants will change but the good ones are able to lern and switch to both sides. And that would mean that there will be no relevant rise of dismissals, at least in germany. I think there will be more dismissals because of a technology switch of microsoft.


Aah, good old times. In some special business areas this is still possible.


I think that's what we can currently watch at the market and what is forcing some of the problems mentioned above.

Hi everyone.

I am sort of back, after lots of pondering over community and what its all about. Sadly I come back to posts like this Message "You must External Document No..." to be changed and realize that not much has changed.

I realize now that things have changed, but I don't now how we can change with them. Clearly Navision has moved into the "satisfaction now" world. Personally I don;t want to be a part of that, but I also realize that I want to remain an active part of the community. So I have been spending some thinking time taking a look form a different perspective and working out how to help people with out being insulted by them.

I see the solution is more in providing solutions, NOT providing answers. So I will be working more in that direction. I will still be active in the forums, but will concentrate more on WIKI and BLOGs.

Anyway time to catch up and see what I have missed.

I didn't realize it had ever not been this way



I've felt that way for a long time, that is too much of providing answers and not enough providing steps to figure it out for yourself. I know I've failed at doing it a large portion of the time. I feel like every time I even try to do it the reply behind me is just the code written out for the original poster or the step by step instructions to fix the problem. I understand not re-coding / re-inventing the wheel, but...

Communities = Help me understand what to do.
Help Desk = Tell me exactly what to do.

At least that's my opinion.

I fully agree...

This is clearly the trend the society is moving towards.

Yes which is exactly what I am saying. For a long time Navision was "different". It is now becoming mainstream so to speak.

Pardon me but I’m a newbie here and I didn't get the point. Navision employees will write to their resume that they have worked for a certain company for 15 years but in fact they had just worked for 4 months? Is that what they call resume inflation? That is because they are cheating about the information in their resume.

No you missed the point. resume inflation is common. The issue here is that Navision is different, and many employers and more importantly, customers, do not realize this. Let me use an analogy.

lets say you are an auto mechanic and have 10 years experience working on Mercedes. You could probably do a course and in 3 months you would be a competent BMW mechanic. Even if you wanted to fix Toyota, its not a huge difference and you could swap over pretty quick. If you were a mechanic for 10 years fixing BMW, Mercedes AND Toyota, then the whole 10 years experience would be useful in fixing any of these cars. Lets think of the mechanic as a a C++ programmer wanting to learn C# or an Oracle developer wanting to switch to SQL.

But now lets look at a taxi driver in New York, lets say this driver spent 10 years driving in Manhattan. They would know all the roads and short cuts and traffic issues. BUT if that driver then moved to London, virtually the entire experience is useless. They would have to start to learn all over again. You can't simply say. "I was a taxi driver in New York" so I can now be a taxi driver in London". This is like a SAP consultant moving to Navision. yeah they know how to drive, but once they get behind the wheel they really do not know where to go.

When companies think of Navision as a programming language, they are doomed to failure, and their customers have no hope of a proper installation.

I would say even the language programmer who switches from C++ to C# is doomed to fail if they disregard the amount of time they will need to get up to speed on the new set of libraries they have to use. For .Net languages you can just go out and grab a book or make good use of the internet and get up to speed in a few months or so. This is certainly not the case for Navision since the entire product is your library and there are no books explaining all the business code in Navision. You really need someone who has spent time on the product, who knows all the do's and don'ts. Now I certainly wish there was some solid documentation on a lot of the business code in Navision, but given that there isn't, experience is incredibly important. Programming a system is not simply a question of syntactical knowledge, but of good design and proper procedures. I think many programmers today (not just new Navision programmers) make the mistake of thinking all they need to know is syntax to be a professional.

This is also the mistake of many employers. I took my first NAV position right out of college. I had been programming for roughly 10 years, although certainly not on any professional level. Just high school and college classes and for fun. I was put through the development one course, aka this is how you define a variable and write a loop in C/AL, but not put through the development two course or any functional training. I was expected to be able to implement and support a payables department with that knowledge. As you can imagine, I was pretty worthless.

I would also add that I think a good way to help new Navision programmers learn the in's and out's of Navision is to use a pair programming model, putting the new programmer with a much more experienced programmer. I should state that I have never tried this myself but it seems to me that this would be a very good way to help new programmers learn practical use, and do so quickly. There are of course pros and cons to this approach but I think the good far outweighs the bad.